Travel Log 12 - South Ethiopia - The wrong way to Kenya

Addis – Awassa (9 hours - minibus)
22/5/08 – 25/5/08
A town ruled by scab-faced storks

We dined at Lewi’s, which by the looks of the fleet of white land cruisers in the car park was the favoured haunt of the NGOs. Their menu was wildly ambitious and their food tasted good but it seemed as if there had been some misunderstandings between the reading of a recipe and the production of the dish itself, which was a little embarrassing when being introduced to the chef. Beer battered fish was fish inside a doughnut and beef with spinach and cheese was deep-fried beef Wellington.

The town sat on the shore of the beautiful Lake Awassa stretching out for miles of perfect stillness, with hardly a boat on it, only reeds, mountains and birds. Walking along the path that followed its lip was Bill Oddie’s wet dream. As non-ornithologists all we knew was that the waders, kingfishers and raptors were, typically of Africans, far more flamboyant than their British counterparts.


Walking back into the town we passed a fish restaurant where the cooks and customers squatted under a tarpaulin set up at the waters edge. Outside stood a guard of huge and hideous storks that looked like Terry Gilliam monsters and lumbered unwillingly out of our way as we passed up onto the road.


Awasa-Arba Minch (9 hours – big bus)
26/5/2008 – 27/5/2008
Avoiding the crocodile market

We found the decision to charge double for farangis to stay at the aptly titled ‘Tourist Hotel’ too hard to swallow so ended up in the even better titled, ‘Hallelujah Pension’ next door.

A man on the bus had recommended a place in Arba Minch called ‘Paradise’ so we set up the hill to find it. The view down in the valley of the silver-domed church glinting in the light creeping out from behind the rain clouds was spectacular. It was good to look at, less good to listen to. Apparently the locals regularly make complaints about the church sound system which is unwillingly turned down but always creeps back up to the ludicrous level we heard. From three in the morning onwards a tag team of shouty-voiced Orthodox Christians whinge in Amharic. It was loud enough that when we had a drink in the evening in a bar several hundred metres away, it was making the music unlistenable. It hard to imagine even their God was enjoying it.

At the top of the hill we came to the dirt track leading to ‘Paradise’ – this road was clearly only ever taken by farangis in 4x4s because the local children were frantic with excitement to see us. A gaggle followed us, occasionally holding our hands. We asked for directions to ‘Paradise’ and one called out to ‘Jesus’ – saviour complexes well and truly established. When we eventually reached ‘Paradise’ it was a new hotel still under construction but the terrace offered superb views of the two lakes Chamo and Abaya separated by the bridge of God.


All the guides in the town had mercana (Amharic for the specific high achieved with ch’at, when it was described to us it was consistently described as something one ‘has’, as if it were enlightenment) because they had not yet encouraged us to visit the mysteriously titled, ‘crocodile market’. After a little investigation it turned out that it was an area of the river where the crocodiles basked and would have been very expensive. ‘Market’ was a shrewd misnomer.

We heard on the grapevine that there would be a market in a village a few hours down the road in Chencha. Having already clocked up a serious number of land miles in the past few days and with more to come, a two-hour bus ride is just like doing stretches.

On the bus which went up and up the mountain a policeman got onboard, presumably to moan about the people squatting in the aisles. When we arrived in Chencha he got into a ruck with the ticket collector who rather embarrassingly knocked the policeman’s hat and received a hard boot to the thigh and a sharp punch to the head. There were no twitching net curtains, everyone crowded round, the shorter ones pulling themselves up on taller shoulders. It seemed to be settled amicably with only two grumpy faces to be seen in the beaming horde.

The bus took us through the post–apocalypse Paradise of the Watch Tower magazine. Everything was in a vibrant green, dotted with bright flowers and fruit. Outside thatched huts sat men and women weaving on wooden looms on the toy-town grass hillocks, kept childlike by cattle. Outside most houses were allotments, dominated by the vast leaves of the false banana, the roots of which we were to discover, form the staple in the region.

A local guide took us across the town’s football pitch which was inhabited by teams of cow, goat and sheep all tied to separate stakes, industriously forming mown circles and continued up to a high point where locals get married. We were surrounded by sea-green mountains and meadowland.

The market had a similar ambience and look to a music festival. People spread out, sitting on a grassed area busily making chaos. Different areas of the market catered for different needs. In the water pipe zone people took it turns to buy a dollop of tobacco and shared it round. In the staple zone women mashed false banana into a pulp with their hands. In fabric zone a man with a wooden spindle demonstrated his craftiness to us with a toothy grin. Our guide told us that the people of this village made the distinctive cloth which the Masai of Kenya wear, but it was hard to know whether or not to believe him.


Arba Minch – Jinka (9 hours – big bus)
28/5/2008
There was a man in a miniskirt next to me on the bus

As it was the thirty-year anniversary of the fall of the Derg (the Communist group which overthrew Haile Selassie) the restaurants and bars of the town were full of old-timers taking the opportunity to reminisce and not so idly talk politics.

It was easy to understand why northern Ethiopians were in favour of the current Prime Minister. His impact was tangible, the roads had improved under his management and there had not been the flagrant violence seen after the last election in which the streets of Addis were awash with blood. As we travelled further south opinion was not so positive. He is of the northern Tigray tribe and it was believed that he favoured his own, to the detriment of the south. Most people believed that he was not a bad person but was operating in a corrupt and biased government. Many of the older generation still clutched to what was perhaps, a rose-tinted nostalgia for the Communist Derg, under which the roads that are now in disrepair were originally built. It is very difficult to know how dissent was forming into rebellion, as the press was so filled with disinformation regarding Somali, Eritrean and Sudanese rebels. What was clear was that in the desperate face of famine that there is a valid fear of an uprising.

A few hours before, on the last part of the journey to Jinka, a member of the Bana tribe got on the bus. His upper biceps were tightly constrained by brass copper bands. His hair was shaved at the front and plaited at the back. He wore a miniskirt and a sports vest. On his wrists he wore bright beading in sky blue, black and red and he carried with him nothing but a wooden perch. It is hard to look dignified in a fifty-year-old bus doing breakneck speeds on 4x4 terrain but he managed it. When the ticket collector asked for his fare he broke from our previously held National Geographic image of the stoical tribesman. He released a one liner presumably regarding the price of the bus ticket, so powerful it brought the previously silent bus into hysterics. He grinned then returned to his world of serenity.

Our original intention had been to travel back seven hours the following day to the town of Konso, which we had already passed through. Unfortunately the road that would take us from Konso to Moyale, the border town with Kenya, was closed due to fighting between rival tribes. This put us in an awkward position: we had to reach Moyale by 1st June because our visas would run out. We decided to head for Key Afar two hours back in the right direction as they had a market on and this was the best chance we had of seeing something of the south. We spent the rest of the day in the ‘Oromo District Research Centre’, which catalogued the peculiarities of the tribes in the area, including lip plates, bull jumping, female circumcision, polygamy, scarring, and soothsaying with goat entrails. They had a collection of wooden perches as we had on the bus. They were stylishly carved in accordance with specific tribal designs. We saw them in use in the area, waiting for buses and general milling about as an uncomfortable looking stool which, apparently, doubled up as a pillow, much like that used by geishas.


Jinka – Key Afar (2 hours-big bus)
29/5/2008
Hustlers with feathers in their hair

Before coming to the Oromo region we were warned by fellow tortoises that much of what we saw in the Rift Valley would not be ‘real’. When local tribes-people get wind of the arrival of farangis they would prepare costumes of brighter colours and more intricacy, to outdo their rival tribes-people and to win the 2 Birr reward normally expected in exchange for taking their photograph. These over-the-top costumes were without cultural significance. From one perspective, who can blame them? Their tribal practices are really none of the tourist’s business. If they are wearing an inauthentic costume, the tourist’s photo may look more spectacular and the tribes-person gets some cash. On the other hand it all sounds a bit sordid. The concept of going to an area to have a ‘real’ experience ‘man’ is more irritating than accepting your position on the other side of the camera lens. What is positive, perhaps, is that a startlingly large proportion of their culture is intact despite being given the opportunity to change.

We can only assume that we went to the right village and the right market and the right tribe because we were the only tourists in the market place and money was only mentioned when we asked prices. It was a mutually starey situation, but more of a giraffe stare than a hyena or crocodile stare. They thought we were dressed oddly and we thought the same of them. The significance of the different elements of the costumes of people in the market was explained to us by a local boy. The women who had thin dreadlocks moulded into shape with red clay were married. Those with a huge metal necklace were the first wife of a husband and therefore important. Men with their hair sculpted and coloured and topped with a feather, making them look startlingly alien with their elongated red, white or blue heads with valve like attachments, indicated that they had recently killed an impressive animal. Those with their hair white at the back had lost their father recently and were still in mourning. Those men with extra beads and tall feathers in their hair were on the look out for a wife. It was an amazing social system that allowed them to cut out a great deal of needless chitchat.


Much of the jewellery was recycled. Many earrings were produced from white plastic packaging and necklaces were made from the broken watchstraps of metal Casios. The choice of materials was indiscriminately focused upon looking good.

During the evening we walked out to one of the clusters of huts on the outskirts of the village as the sun was setting over the maize fields. We were introduced to a family who performed a dance for us. It was a fairly mercenary experience, the dance was for our entertainment. However, after we alighted from the ‘real’ high horse it was clear to see that as they leapt around and mock shoulder barged one another, they were enjoying themselves and it suited the moment perfectly as they rhythmically ‘hummmm’ed and their jewellery clattered as they came back to earth, dust rising from their feet. We drank tea made from the husks of coffee beans and tried to persuade the grandmother that it was OK that the smaller children who were clearly terrified of us, did not have to come and shake hands with us, we did not want anyone wetting themselves.


Key Afar – Sodo (12 hours – big bus, minibus, landcruiser)
30/5/2008

As tribal fighting was blocking our intended route and we had only two days left on our visas, we had to retrace our steps sharpish before our visas finished, right back up to near Awasa in order to get onto the road running from Addis Ababa to Moyale. Leg one should have taken us back to Arba Minch but the bus broke down less than half way there, just before a village made up of not much more than a hotel. We walked along the road in the mid-day sun with tribes-people and business men and were lucky enough to hitch a ride in the cab of a lorry a few kilometres down the road, while meeting the disapproving glares of our fellow bus riders, still tramping along in the heat. From the hotel we smarmed a lift with Catholic missionaries the rest of the way, much to the indignation of bus riders who felt we were getting preferential treatment – finally! Before reaching Arba Minch we stopped for lunch in Konso, home of the perma-culture ecolodge Brits we met in Addis. We asked the waiter if he knew them and he replied that they had been there just the night before and he promised to pass on our best wishes. From Arba Minch we found a bus that took us the three hours down the road to Sodo. By the time we reached the town everyone was tired and hungry. When the driver stopped for petrol a couple of minutes from the bus station there was a very real possibility of a rebellion. We scouted around the dingy Sodo for somewhere to stay, everywhere half decent was fully booked so we ended up in a brothel perched above a bad disco.


Sodo – Dila
31/5/2008

In the morning we woke at 5.00 once again to fight for a seat on the 6.00 bus – departure time is dictated by the government in an attempt to prevent night driving and move Ethiopia off the top-spot for worldwide road fatality rates. We arrived in Awasa in the afternoon and took a minibus to a rainy Dila where we stayed over. By this point we had passed the stage of hysteria and were well and truly in a state of grumpy confusion. Now as we tried to sleep on the bus, if we went over a dramatic bump and banged our head against something, it was no longer chance, but part of some sadistic joke.

During the evening in Dila a woman selling baskets invited us into her shop for a coffee ceremony. Her blind grandfather sat in the corner going through his prayer beads and periodically praying. They told us about the local language and how they learned English from a flat-screen TV donated to them by Germans, all while we ate delicious popcorn and drank delicious coffee and a tailor a few doors down repaired Toby’s bag with his leg-powered sewing machine. The following morning it was Dila to Moyale and the beginning of a whole new type of strangeness.


Escape to Kenya
Moyale

Young cats prowled across the flat concrete roofs, the ‘city’ behind them, creeping up the hillside, lit up and squat. The pregnant quietness of the Kenyan side of the town only became noticeable when manic allah akhbar’s began to sound from the mosque. A stark contrast from the typically rowdy Ethiopian side of town.

Moyale had the now familiar unfamiliarity of a border town, on the frontier of something more than another country but not discernable. People passed through and left a gaggle of chancers whose lives were dictated by the movements of a fickle river. The river being made up of stray tourists, downtrodden businessmen, people visiting family, trucks full of cargo and lonely and frustrated men in search of Ethiopian ‘company’. They picked up what is left on the shoreline – in this case, two not so shiny new mwzungus (Swahili for white man, literally translated as ‘man without smell’) staring at their bowls of stew in the ‘Baghdad Restaurant II’, wondering how to eat it without cutlery.

The border between Ethiopia and Kenya was a metal pole weighed down by some rocks and a rusted wheel rim. As we re-entered Ethiopia after sorting out a hotel in Kenya and a bus to Nairobi for the following day, passport control called us over. We were under strict instructions to be back before six because they would be clocking off.


Moyale to Nairobi (26 hours – big bus, minibus)
2/6/2008 – 3/6/2008

After this period of waking up before the sun, spending a day sitting on a bus, arriving in a town eating anything and collapsing anywhere, what did we need? A twenty-six hour bus journey of course! The bus was just like the geriatric boneshakers of Ethiopia but with, much to Stuart’s knee’s delight, slightly more legroom. We were told beforehand that the big bus is safer than the trucks because shifters (armed bandits who extort money) were generally local and therefore much more likely to hit one of their relatives if the spray a big bus with bullets. However, the addition of an armed guard was there to offer reassurance. After two police checks within the first half hour we made bets as to how many there would be before we reached Nairobi, the winning figure being nine. When we stopped for dinner the bus’ mechanic introduced himself to us. Apparently we could rest easy because he was now on board as the police had decided to release him from prison, where he languished on charges of cannabis possession. Charges he was very pleased were true. Another member of the bus team, whose role we could not entirely discern, was a Somali. He proudly told us how he had made his money as a member of Dog Crew in Cardiff for whom he sold smack and cocaine. Brilliant! The scenery was almost enough of a distraction. We passed through a very British looking landscape, other than the mighty presence of Mount Kenya, rising incongruously from the horizon. The next morning we were still chugging along with few enough passengers to lie down on the spare seats when the bus broke down. From here on we took a pimped out minibus or matatu as it is know in Swahili right into heaving central Nairobi.